I’m pleased to announce that The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror, just out from Britain’s Flame Tree Publishing, contains a chapter by me. S. T. Joshi served as consultant editor for the project. He also wrote the book’s introduction. Ramsey Campbell provided the foreword. Other chapter contributors include Roger Luckhurst, Mike Ashley, Michael…
Tag: Books
Philip Roth on the value of serious literature amid the hellscape of contemporary America
Philip Roth, 1973 Here’s Nathaniel Rich, writing for The New York Review of Books about Philip Roth’s Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013: Between the interviews given in self-defense, the conversations with peers, and the exchanges with angry Jews, there emerges from Roth’s nonfiction a unified theory of the novel as a bulwark against the excesses…
The centering power of reading in an age of mass distraction
If reading is not always an act of liberation, it is at least an act of self-definition. It is an experience of solitude in which we become unavailable to those immediately around us. Even when we read to someone else, usually a lover or a child, or have them read to us, the effect is…
The Folio Society’s new edition of Lovecraft’s stories looks gorgeous (and eldritch)
The gorgeous-looking new edition of Lovecraft’s stories from The Folio Society, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, has this really effective (and kind of gorgeous in its own right) promotional video to go with it. Sadly, I don’t have $120 to spare. But with illustrations by Dan Hillier — who comes off quite…
What a shame the world isn’t just driving over hills and never coming to a town
The sun was gone. The sky lingered its colors for a time while they sat in the clearing. At last, he heard a whispering. She was getting up. She put out her hand to take his. He stood beside her, and they looked at the woods around them and the distant hills. They began to…
A fascinating and important re-visioning of God and religion: “God: An Autobiography”
It was around 2010 that I first became aware of Jerry Martin’s book in progress titled God: An Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher. I was deep into blogging at the (now-defunct) Demon Muse site at the time, and I was developing A Course in Demonic Creativity from those materials. So thoughts about the experience…
On the burning of manuscripts in the digital age
When we talk about burning books or manuscripts, we usually think in terms of a Nazi-like, Fahrenheit 451-ish circumstance of repression and censorship. But there’s a venerable and remarkable tradition of writers burning their own manuscripts, or expressing a desire to burn them, or talking about the value of burning them. Think Kafka (burned most…
The serendipity of irrelevant reading
From biblical theologian Wesley Hill in First Things: Irrelevant reading is the sort of reading you do when you pick up a book that, you fear, has nothing whatever to say to your present concern, the thing that’s driving you to want to read in the first place. Say you’re a teacher and you want…
A pall of uncanny corruption: ‘The Infusorium’ by Jon Padgett
New chapbook. From Dunhams Manor Press. By one of my dearest friends. Softcover and signed hardcover editions already sold out. Only a few copies of standard (unsigned) hardcover left. You should PURCHASE. Update 04/20/15: The book is sold out. About the book: Dunnstown is in the midst of a strange season: the choking fogs of…
Forthcoming from Richard Gavin: ‘The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul’
Teem member Richard Gavin has a new book coming out this summer from Theion Publishing — and it’s nonfiction. Richard, as you know, has built a major reputation in recent years as a writer of exquisite weird fiction in a darkly esoteric and philosophical vein, and this book promises to be a kind of nonfiction…